Category Archives: Uncategorized

I think we’ve pretty much narrowed out idea (finally) down to the problem of anonymity in the online environment. What this means is, we have to start thinking about our target audience and who we are actually speaking to with this feature (“You talkin’ to me?” says DeNiro).

Dean (2010) sees blogs (and by extension, I guess, online features) as emerging out of a missing “subject supposed to know”. If we view our blog in this way, what we want to provide information to people who think The Silk Road is completely anonymous and either want to access it or are skeptical of it because of this fact. As users usually don’t find exactly what they want from a Google search (i.e. they don’t search the semantics of a query as shown by Finkelstein (2008)) our feature will pop up as a related and important source of information to keep these users informed about the real mechanics of data collection and potential tracking and whether or not you can really be anonymous online.

This week’s readings made me think about how the ideology behind the Silk Road (whose philosophy is summarised on their Facebook page – “You may buy anything you desire or sell anything you desire. You have total Freedom and Liberty to do as you see fit to do! A true Agorist vision”) matches with some of the ideology behind P2P programs and how there is, as Vaidhyanathan (2004) states, a dichotomy between access values and property values.

In the case of the Silk Road though, it’s not really property values but rather moral values about the illegality of drugs. Users believe that it is their right to be able to access ‘free culture’ through the consumption of illicit drugs. The Silk Road is decentralised (anyone can sell, no one knows who runs it), antiauthoritarian, difficult to manage (the use of Tor, anonymity and Bitcoin management) and extensible in that it can be accessed by anyone that’s ever done a Google search.

Maybe one thing that really connects the two besides through this ideology is the fact that it is an anonymous (mostly anyway) act of resistance from ‘market’ and social norms. Would you steal a car or go to a seedy alleyway to meet a dealer? Or would you rather download something secretly in your jimjams at home or get it expressly delivered to your home without anyone (theoretically) knowing?

References:

Siva Vaidhyanathan (2004) ‘The Ideology of Peer-to-Peer’, The Anarchist in the Library. Basic Books: New York.

After the presentation I threw around a few ideas about maybe demonstrating hype by creating our own curiosity experiment and then counting how many people checked it out. I don’t know exactly how this will help our problem (see posts below) but it’ll be a way of making people come to our feature and make a point about how the media are inadvertently advertising the black marketplace through a hit counter or something.

In the meantime I found that one of the websites that lists the instructions of how to get onto the Silk Road website had tracking widgets on their sidebar. The uselessly named ‘mainstream los’ blog not only features really aggressively named songs on a playlist, but also has a graphic tracking where all the visitors come from and presenting this information visually.

If we do something similar we could use what this blog used and use a 3rd party service such as FlagCounter to monitor traffic coming to our mock website. It even tells us which of these people are from Australia so that would help with the cause/effect issues of such an experiment. Just an idea.

We just presented our idea of investigating whether media hype does more harm than good in relation to the Silk Road today but Jonathon (hello you are reading this now) raised the problem that we had thought about previously, which was the interesting things like anonymity and privacy don’t really fit in with this line of thought… How are we going to mash all these ideas into a coherent whole??

I guess at the moment, the Silk Road would be at the peak of inflated expectations stage. Maybe an approach from the theory behind media hype will better structure our feature, instead of coming from a media point of view. We could instead see media as important influencers in this stage, except with the Silk Road there seems not to be any disillusionment or danger since authorities haven’t exactly caught up yet with the anonymity aspect of it, resulting in little ‘down-side’ to the experience. Maybe we can see if any other downsides can be found through talking to other users? Just musing.

Media Hype – how the media have ironically resulted in the site having more users. I guess they kind of act like a indirect marketing/PR tool for the site.

Anonymity – The ways in which people are being sneaky about it always fascinates me. But then there are also limits it it since Tor crashed and the AFP says that they can track importers. Also, d. boyd’s (2008) notion of “security through obscurity” could be an interesting way of thinking about Silk Road anonymity too.

There are more but I’ve run out of the word limit for this post… Where is my eureka moment?

The Bernie Su and Hank Green team behind the innovative Lizzie Bennet Diaries has announced that they will once again bring Jane Austen classics to life in the vlog format. The new show, called “Emma Approved”, as the title suggests, is based on Austen’s novel Emma and will be set in the same universe as their popular Pride and Prejudice adaptation.

The announcement has excited fans such as myself, as unlike in the first series where it made no sense for the male protagonist to appear in Lizzie Bennet’s personal, confessional style vlogs, the male love interest of Mr. Knightley will more than likely appear from the beginning as Emma’s older BFF/brother figure. Fans will no longer have to wait 50 episodes in to catch a glimpse of their leading man.

This aspect of the source material also paves the way for interesting transmedia storytelling opportunities as the teasing banter the two share in the book would make for interesting twitter conversations filled with ZINGERS.

Here’s hoping they make it a little less incestuous than it was in the original, with Mr. Knightley being her sister’s husband’s older brother, and in the eponymous 90s classic Clueless, where they were step siblings (albeit for a very short time).